Beasts & Barbarians
by truhekili
Summary: Alex Izzie One-shot. Set 15 years after series events through episode 5.10. All characters are property of ABC; I own nothing.


Beasts & Barbarians

It was too quiet. Bedlam, chaos and mayhem were over-due. Izzie Stevens stirred reluctantly, thankful, again, that at least they'd carpeted the up-stairs bedrooms in ultra plush pile. A steady fire still crackled quietly beside them, as day two of Seattle's latest epic snowfall blew glistening white flakes past the wall of windows, serenely blanketing their huge backyard.

She enjoyed these dreamy pre-dawn moments, before her peace was swept away by blaring video games and Saturday morning cartoons, by the popcorn and pudding breakfasts their three uncivilized sons preferred, by the inevitable battles over sled rights and shoveling duties, by the waves of discarded boots and hats and gloves flooding her pristine kitchen floor.

Shifting somewhat stiffly, she tried not to wake Alex as she repositioned him, struggling to get more comfortable, and rolling her eyes as he curled more tightly around her. After almost fifteen years together they'd added twenty pounds - or so - between them, most of his, she was sure, in the form of double stuff Oreos.

Her eyes idly trailed her fingers as she stroked him gently, his body, like hers, burnished a golden amber in the faint glow of the fireplace. Early in their marriage, and again after the birth of their second son, she'd worn fancy lingerie, which he met with a smirk. She tried silk and satin, which he met with puzzled frowns, and gauzy, romantic lace, which he met with bemused mockery. Finally – in sarcastic protest- she tried head to toe plaid flannel, which met with grumblings about extra laundry.

She did not speak Barbarian then, and resented his crude, spare practicality, his drive to cut right to the chase. Almost a decade later, she realized that he simply saw no need for finery or fantasy between them, expanding bodies not withstanding. Silk and satin still lingered in her closet, but Izzie Stevens, unadorned, was all he wanted.

She had not taken his name when they wed, nor would their children. She never learned more than bits and pieces of the past that he fled like a burning building, enough only to understand vaguely that whatever he sought to escape, he was determined that it end with him. Watching him sleep, she delicately brushed a few spiky wisps of hair from his face.

Bitter experience had taught her long before that it was just a matter of time before the ghosts returned – they always did. She wondered when his dead would come for him – as hers still did, even after the surgery, and the pills, and the talk therapy - and what they would find, and what else they would take from him, and what they would leave behind.

Drawing him closer to her, she absently traced the familiar curves and sinews of his back, his soft murmurs blending into the fire crackling beside them. She couldn't remember the last time he'd said that he loved her, but his reputation had taken enough of a hit the first time, and again, when he'd returned to neo-natal surgery for good. She could still hear Cristina, now Chief Cardiothoracic Surgeon at Mercy West, chortling about how hard core, bad ass Evil Spawn himself had gone all pink and squishy.

His choice had surprised all of them, even Mere, and proved to this day the fodder of endless taunting, though her own was accepted without comment, as if it were inevitable.

As if she returned to run the clinic that bore Denny's name as if pulled by gravity, as if she could never leave it. It had never been a point of contention, even with Alex, even when it should have been, even when she wanted it to be.

He accepted it like Seattle natives accepted the weather, like it was inescapable, that part of her would always be held back from him, would forever slip though his fingers like fine grain sand, stealing away as he watched helplessly.

She knew this would never have worked at all if he weren't such a damned cynic, if he'd had any of her fine faith in fairy tales, if he'd expected anything more from his life than crumbs. But she knew that he never really believed in anything, that he never really dreamed, that even crumbs were something when you were starving – and when you'd never had anything to begin with.

She knew that the only currency of love he even recognized was simpler than hers could ever be, measured not in words, or wishes, or grand hopes, but in cupcakes, in kisses, in bouquets of corpses, and that he could scarcely trust even the ghost of love she offered, even as so much of her heart escaped his grasp.

She knew it was her fault, that her romantic fantasies – home brewed in a trailer park – would always envision a dashing prince charming slaying her dragons and sweeping her away to a castle above the clouds – and not a barbarian with a scalpel tracking cookie crumbs through a contemporary split level house on a wooded lot. But her fantasies had once been all she had, when she was young, and poor, and scared, and pregnant, and all but alone; they had been her only escape from the cramped, leaky single wide that could so easily have been her fate. They were old friends; she could hardly abandon them.

She poked him lightly, almost bemused at how soundly he slept after her beast devoured him. She knew that parts of him were withheld, too, held hostage by ghosts she could scarcely fathom. She had not gone cardio, she couldn't. But she knew that the heart, like any muscle, grew misshapen if starved in its development, as parts of it simply withered and died away, and that it would always beat improperly, with a lopsided rhythm.

Her morning ritual left her intimately familiar with his heartbeat, enough to see it echoed in his crooked grin, the shy half smile that always harbored a question mark, as if her feelings for him were always under advisement, and could be withdrawn at any moment. She wished their story were simpler. But her heart, too, bore dark corners and shadowy cobwebs, and old princess dresses that she could never bring herself to put away.

Resting her head against his chest, she listened, as she always did before drifting back to sleep. She woke several hours later, a commotion erupting outside the window, drowning out the din of the freshly stoked fire. She found her fluffy white robe folded haphazardly on the rug beside her, and a steaming tea cup on the bench at the foot of their bed.

Donning her robe and collecting her tea, she looked out over the deck and down through the still lively blizzard to the snowball fight raging below. Shaking her head with a smirk, she watched as their three Stooges - as their father gruffly called them, to their delight – besieged the makeshift snow fort he'd built the day before, and now defended gamely.

She knew that that was his first instinct against all attacks real and imagined – to build a fortress, and wall himself in – and she wondered how much of that had been her doing, so long ago, and if they'd ever get beyond where they were, each in their own separate peace: she with her ghosts, he with his.

She watched her three scarcely civilized sons, and wondered – almost amused – if some of what no doubt lurked downstairs – the popcorn ground into the carpet, the pudding smeared on the couch, the milk cartons leaking on her fine granite counter tops - was Karma's revenge for giving up the perfect daughter she still dreamed of.

She restored what order she could to their home, and woke the next day to more driving snow, to a silvery dawn peeking in through the skylight, to the almost comical sight of their bed– a four poster special order cheery wood masterpiece, stylishly dressed in silk and satin linens, sitting unoccupied across the room – again - as she lay tangled in a beige sea of down comforters piled on the carpet beside the fireplace, an exhausted barbarian coiled around her, sleeping peacefully.

She understood his primitive, caveman logic, and even his dogged practicality; it was warm by the fire, and the tree lined view from the wall of windows was spectacular, and the skylight – especially on clear evenings – framed the moon and the stars.

And, really, even the four poster wasn't the bed she'd always fantasized about, the one with the romantic, gauze canopy – which he'd vetoed on principle – and the grand wood carvings, at which he only shook his head without comment. But he didn't belong in her fantasies anyway, tracking Oreo crumbs across her expensive sheets. Barbarian that he was, he knew that as well as she did.

Gathering him closer to her, she slid her hands gently down his sides, savoring his deep, contented sigh. She'd long ago realized that Barbarian was spoken in quiet murmurs and written directly into bare flesh, that it had no direct translation into any language she was familiar with, not the English that spun fine fairy tales with charming princes, nor even the English of beasts. "I know," she whispered, kissing him softly as his body molded itself so predictably to the familiar movements of her own, "me too."


End file.
